NBA players familiar with taunting but not to level of Detroit fans

Line clear, Rockets security chief says

Published 6:30 am, Sunday, November 21, 2004

LOS ANGELES - Tracy McGrady never hears the words from the stands, blocking them out before they can somehow worm their way in.

Patrick Ewing has heard them all, and having heard the most offensive of insults, he learned long ago to steel himself to ignore them.

Maurice Taylor has heard them, felt them and almost wanted to take them back to their source -- to just once get in the face of someone spewing such vile.

But never had they seen what they saw happen Friday night in Auburn Hills, Mich. Never have the worst of fans gotten the better of them. Never could they have imagined, with all they had seen and heard, that it would come to this.

The Rockets, like many in the NBA, were buzzing about the melee in the Palace on Friday night, sympathizing with if not quite excusing players they believed were provoked into charging into the stands.

"When you're on the basketball court, you hear that fans are heckling you," McGrady said. "But fans, they can't come down and play you. I let them say what they got to say. What happened last night is a different story. I think sometimes they (the fans) cross the line. When you throw something at a guy that's not doing anything but minding his own business and you hit him in the face with something, that's really crossing the line.

"If the players should get suspended, something should happen to the fans. Those guys didn't do anything but sit there on the basketball court minding their own business until something was thrown. Obviously, when somebody throws something at you, you want to protect yourself."

That line, Ewing said, separated the derision he heard from the confrontation the Pacers felt.

"Nobody ever threw anything at me," he said.

Friday's incident moved from a routine skirmish on the court to a brawl in the stands when Pacers forward Ron Artest was hit in the face with a plastic cup of ice that had been thrown from the stands.

Artest had been lying on the scorers' table after an altercation with the Pistons' Ben Wallace.

When he was hit by the cup, he took off into the stands, with he and teammate Stephen Jackson swinging punches at fans, and many more players moving into the crowd to try to get teammates and opponents back to the court.

Where the fault lies

On Saturday, Artest, Jackson, Wallace and Pacers centerJermaine O'Neal were suspended indefinitely while the NBA conducts its investigation.

Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy spoke of a problem that begins before that line his players mentioned is crossed.

Van Gundy described taunts from fans as symptoms of the problem that might help explain how an incident can escalate from a confrontation on the court to violence in the stands.

"Certainly fans in that situation bear a large burden of responsibility," Van Gundy said. "We have gotten into a mentality that anything goes. As a fan, you can say anything. I think civility needs to make a comeback as far as fan behavior. Be more positive for your team vs. negative toward opposing teams and/or players.

"Paying money to go to a game does not entitle you to do uncivilized things that would not be tolerated on the street. You can't walk up to somebody on the street and pour something over a guy, say anything you want to a guy, and have no ramifications.

"I'm not trying to say Artest's response was correct. I'm saying, `Do not put all the burden on Artest.' He's an easy target for all the things he's been through."

The incident is considered shocking in the United States, but Rockets forward Bostjan Nachbar said he has experienced something similar in Europe.

Playing the Italian League championship game in Bologna, Nachbar said he and his Benetton Treviso teammates were overrun by fans in the closing minutes.

"With a minute to go, the fans rushed onto the court," Nachbar said. "There were a thousand fans on the court. But we ran to the locker room. It was a weird experience. It's what I thought of right away when I saw what happened. But it was way worse yesterday because we ran away before they got to us."

Whether because of the numbers of fans involved or the players' familiarity with such scenes, that decision might have kept Nachbar's experience from becoming like Artest's.

Butch Grant, the Rockets director of team security and a former NBA security representative, said that no matter how they are tempted, players must know that situations will only deteriorate if players go into the stands.

"Going into the stands is always wrong," Grant said. "You don't go into the stands. If you go into the stands, you're asking for trouble."

Defending one's own

Some of the Pacers have been seen as sticking up for their teammates. Several players made their way into the stands to act as peacemakers, a decision Van Gundy and Los Angeles Clippers coach Mike Dunleavy called appropriate.

"If one of my guys all of a sudden went into the stands and was in a fight, you have to protect him," Dunleavy said. "You have to get him out. You don't try to escalate it. You have to get him out, pull him to safety and get the thing calmed down. If you get fined for that, you get fined for that.

"In that situation, unless those guys were chained to their seats, they were going to be there."

What can be done?

Few had suggestions to prevent future incidents.

Van Gundy called the fight in Auburn Hills too great an aberration to rush to make changes. But it was clear that Rockets players knew how the Pacers felt and believed that if they reacted wrongly, their actions were also understandable.

"Sometimes fans think they can get away with certain things because they're fans and we're basketball players and they always assume nothing is going to happen," Taylor said. "Like, `This player is never going to come into the stands. We're safe. We can say what we want. We can do what we want.'

"I never felt unsafe. I've been in situations I wanted to make someone else feel unsafe. Sometimes people say things. Sometimes they do things.

"You have to be professional and turn the other cheek, but we're people. We're all men, regardless of who's wearing a jersey and who is wearing regular clothes."